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Pioneer Fund was incorporated on March 11, 1937. The first five directors were:

Wickliffe Preston Draper, the fund's de facto final authority, served on the Board of Directors from 1937 until 1972. He founded Pioneer Fund after having acquired an interest in the Eugenics movement, which was strengthened by his 1935 visit to Nazi Germany, where he met with the leading eugenicists of the Third Reich who used the inspiration from the American movement as a basis for the Nuremberg Laws. He served in the British army at the beginning of World War I, transferring to the US Army as the Americans entered the war. During World War II he was stationed as an intelligence officer in India.[9] Psychology professor William H. Tucker describes Draper as someone who "aside from his brief periods of military service ... never pursued a profession or held a job of any kind."[2] According to a 1960 article in The Nation, an unnamed geneticist said Draper told him he "wished to prove simply that Negroes were inferior."[10] Draper funded advocacy of repatriation of blacks to Africa.[11][12] Draper also made large financial contributions to efforts to oppose the American Civil Rights Movement and the racial desegregation mandated by Brown v. Board of Education, such as $215,000 to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1963.[2]

Harry Laughlin was the director of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He served as the president of Pioneer Fund from its inception until 1941. He opposed miscegenation and had proposed a research agenda to assist in the enforcement of Southern "race integrity laws" by developing techniques for identifying the "pass-for-white" person who might "successfully hide all of his black blood".[2] He singled out Jews and fought efforts to allow entry into the United States to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.[9] Eleven months after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, Laughlin wrote an official at the University of Heidelberg (which had awarded him an honorary doctorate) that the United States and the Third Reich shared "a common understanding of ... the practical application" of eugenic principles to "racial endowments and ... racial health."[2]

The 1937 incorporation documents of the Pioneer Fund list two purposes. The first, modeled on the Nazi Lebensborn breeding program,[15] was aimed at encouraging the propagation of those "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks, or to classes of children, the majority of whom are deemed to be so descended". Its second purpose was to support academic research and the "dissemination of information, into the 'problem of heredity and eugenics'" and "the problems of race betterment".[14] The Pioneer Fund argues the "race betterment" has always referred to the "human race" referred to earlier in the sentence, and critics argue it referred to racial groups. The document was amended in 1985 and the phrase changed to "human race betterment."

The Pioneer Fund supported the distribution of a eugenics film titled Erbkrank ("Hereditary Defective" or "Hereditary Illness") which was published by the pre-war 1930s Nazi Party. William Draper obtained the film from the predecessor to the Nazi Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) prior to the founding of the Pioneer Fund.[2] According to the Pioneer Fund site, all founders capable of doing so participated in the war against the Nazis.[16]

In the 1950s and 1960s Draper supported two government committees that gave grants for both anti-immigration and genetics research. The committee members included Representative Francis E. Walter (chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee and head of the Draper Immigration Committee), Henry E. Garrett (an educator known for his belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks), and Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, head of the Draper Genetics Committee.[18]

Many of the researchers whose findings support the hereditarian hypothesis of racial IQ disparity have received grants of varying sizes from the Pioneer Fund.[22] Large grantees, in order of amount received, are:

J. Philippe Rushton at the University of Western Ontario was head of the fund from 2002 to his death in 2012. In 1999, Rushton used some of his grant money from the Pioneer fund to send out tens of thousands of copies of an abridged version of his book Race, Evolution and Behavior to social scientists in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, causing a controversy.[25] Tax records from 2000 show that his Charles Darwin Institute received $473,835 – 73% of that year's grants.[26]

Roger Pearson at the Institute for the Study of Man. Eugenicist and anthropologist, founder of the Journal of Indo-European Studies,[27] received over a million dollars in grants in the 'eighties and the 'nineties.[2][22] Using the pseudonym of Stephan Langton, Pearson was the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966–67 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question", which included articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa", "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power", and "Swindlers of the Crematoria".[22] The Northern League, an organization founded in England in 1958 by Pearson, supported Nazi ideologies and included former members of the Nazi Party.[2]

Aurelio José Figueredo, as of 2018, the only academic researcher receiving funding from the Pioneer Fund. According to the Associated Press, from 2003 to 2016 Figueredo received $458,000. Figueredo received between $8,000 and $30,000 for the 2017-2018 academic year.[6][28]

The Pioneer Fund was described by the Sunday Telegraph (March 12, 1989) as a "neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics."[34]

In 2003, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed the Pioneer Fund as a hate group, citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with racist individuals.[4][35]

The Center for New Community, a human rights advocacy organization, mentioned the Pioneer Fund in an article on their website. They characterize the Pioneer Fund as "a white supremacist foundation that specializes in funding 'science' dedicated to demonstrating white intellectual and moral superiority." They draw particular attention to Rushton's theories about differences between races as evidence of the racial slant which they claim accompanies much of the research which is backed by the Fund.[36]

In accord with the tax regulations governing nonprofit corporations, Pioneer does not fund individuals; under the law only other nonprofit organizations are appropriate grantees. As a consequence, many of the fund's awards go not to the researchers themselves but to the universities that employ them, a standard procedure for supporting work by academically based scientists. In addition to these awards to the universities where its grantees are based, Pioneer has made a number of grants to other nonprofit organizations and corporations Tucker feels have been created to channel resources to a particular academic recipient while circumventing the institution where the researcher is employed.[2][37]

In 2002, William H. Tucker criticized the Pioneer's grant-funding techniques:

Pioneer's administrative procedures are as unusual as its charter. Although the fund typically gives away more than half a million dollars per year, there is no application form or set of guidelines. Instead, according to Weyher, an applicant merely submits "a letter containing a brief description of the nature of the research and the amount of the grant requested." There is no requirement for peer review of any kind; Pioneer's board of directors – two attorneys, two engineers, and an investment broker – decides, sometimes within a day, whether a particular research proposal merits funding. Once the grant has been made, there is no requirement for an interim or final report or even for an acknowledgment by a grantee that Pioneer has been the source of support, all atypical practices in comparison to other organizations that support scientific research.[2]

Rushton, who headed Pioneer until 2012, spoke at conferences of the American Renaissance (AR) magazine, in which he has also published articles.[38] Anti-racist Searchlight Magazine described one such AR conference as a "veritable 'who's who' of American white supremacy."[39]

Hampton University sociology professor Steven J. Rosenthal described the fund in 1995 as a "Nazi endowment specializing in production of justifications for eugenics since 1937, the Pioneer Fund is embedded in a network of right-wing foundations, think tanks, religious fundamentalists, and global anti-Communist coalitions".[40]

Behavioral geneticist David T. Lykken has defended his acceptance of money from the fund, writing "If you can find me some rich villains that want to contribute to my research – Qaddafi, the Mafia, whoever – the worse they are, the better I'll like it. I'm doing a social good by taking their money ... Any money of theirs that I spend in a legitimate and honorable way, they can't spend in a dishonorable way".[42]

Science writer Morton Hunt received Pioneer funding for his book and wrote: "One could spend hundreds of pages on the pros and cons of the case of the Pioneer Fund, but what matters to me – and should matter to my readers – is that I have been totally free to research and write as I chose. I alerted Pioneer to my political views when making the grant proposal for this book but its directors never blinked."[43]

In a review of Richard Lynn's book on the Pioneer Fund, psychologist Ulrich Neisser, a prominent critic of race-based research, writes: "All things considered, I doubt that the Pioneer Fund's political activities have made much difference one way or the other. The world would have been much the same without them. On the other hand, Lynn reminds us that Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research – research that otherwise might not have been done at all. By that reckoning, I would give it a weak plus."[44]

Charles Murray defended the use of studies supported by the fund in his book The Bell Curve by saying: "Never mind that the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today's Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to the relationship between Henry Ford's antisemitism and today's Ford Foundation. The charges have been made, they have wide currency, and some people will always believe that The Bell Curve rests on data concocted by neo-Nazi eugenicists."[45]

Researchers who have been criticized for accepting grants from the fund have argued that the public debates have been disconnected from the expert debates. Robert A. Gordon, for example, replied to media criticisms of grant-recipients: "Politically correct disinformation about science appears to spread like wildfire among literary intellectuals and other nonspecialists, who have few disciplinary constraints on what they say about science and about particular scientists and on what they allow themselves to believe."[46]